THE ROYAL COMMISSION ON AFFORESTATION. lOI 



tinues, "desire to create in that country, under the political, 

 social, legal, and economic conditions of the twentieth century, in 

 the course of sixty years, results similar to those which Germany 

 owes to many centuries of historical development — a veritable 

 labour of Hercules ! " 



The Commissioners' estimates for afforestation are considered 

 excessively high, amounting to double the actual cost in 

 Germany of similar operations with hole planting, under the 

 most difficult and expensive conditions, and including the cost 

 of planting material. The costliness of the work is ascribed to 

 the proposal to utilise the labour of the unemployed, which, 

 for all cultural operations is condemned as unsuitable and 

 unnecessarily expensive in Germany, where women and boys 

 are employed on the actual planting, and where one foreman 

 is employed to twenty or thirty labourers. 



It is -noted that the Commissioners' scheme extends only to 

 such areas as have been actually acquired by the State, and 

 that it contains no final proposals for encouraging private 

 parties to participate in the national undertaking. This is 

 unfavourably compared with the action of the Prussian Govern- 

 ment, who undertake the supervision of all village, communal, 

 corporation, and institution forests gratis, and grant considerable 

 sums to poor communities for the afforestation of their waste 

 lands in hilly regions. The success of the scheme, both from 

 a silvicultural and financial point of view (land and money 

 being forthcoming) is fully accepted, but it is considered prob- 

 lematical whether, even under such circumstances, the 

 arguments of the Royal Commission, collected with great 

 industry, will be sufficient to move the English Parliament. 



All the British daily papers have commented on the 

 afforestation scheme evolved by the Royal Commission, but 

 the most valuable and only real criticism I have read is 

 contained in a paper read by Dr Nisbet at the fifteenth 

 ordinary meeting of the Royal Society of Arts. It is a well 

 considered and practical article ; still I fail to see why, with 

 reasonable deductions for unexpected disasters, estimates should 

 not be framed as regards future silvicultural and financial 

 possibilities for periods sixty or eighty years ahead. As a 

 matter of fact, Dr Nisbet does this himself in the paragraph pre- 

 ceding that in which he criticises the actuarial calculations, as 

 he calls them, by saying that on an average a 60-year-old 



